


Death and Dean Winchester

by jessie_pie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dark, Episode: s06e11 Appointment in Samarra, Gen, One Shot, episode coda, very dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8568706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessie_pie/pseuds/jessie_pie
Summary: 76,712 people.76,712 people and he remembered all of their names.How much is Sam worth?This story is about Dean's time as Death. As such, it contains multiple deaths, including infant and child deaths. Content warnings for drug use, suicide and scrupulosity also apply.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like there were a lot of issues Appointment in Samarra could have explored in more detail. Sure, Dean wouldn’t hesitate to kill the monster to save Sam, but innocent people? And how well does the excuse “they were going to die anyways” really work?
> 
>  
> 
> Dean was on the clock from sometime during the daylight (presumably morning) to sometime after dark. He was obviously responsible for more than the four or so deaths we saw on screen. For the sake of simplicity, I assumed Dean was Death for about twelve hours before he cracked. According to the World Health Organization, about 56 million people died in 2012. This means approximately 153,424 people die per day or about 76,712 during Dean’s stint. 
> 
>  
> 
> Furthermore, at the end, Death tells Dean that he and Sam are “responsible for disruption on a global scale.” The Winchester’s motto is “Saving people, hunting things.” There’s no way they can even keep up with the devastation caused by earthquakes, fires and hurricanes. Dean’s not stupid. He has to realize that he’s killing people just by existing. His primary reason for living is gone. The episode didn’t even touch on the implications of Death’s revelation, or why Dean chose to keep on going. 
> 
>  
> 
> Supernatural is not the property of this author, and special thanks to Osito for beta-ing.

76,712 people. 76,712 people and he remembered all of their names.

Humans weren’t meant to remember that much. Sometimes, he struggled to remember the names of the men his father had hunted with. He couldn’t remember all of the people they had saved. It had to be part of the magic on the ring.  
76,712 people and he remembered all of their names.  
Some of the deaths were what he expected: greasy food and fast cars, old age and bad luck. Others weren’t. But no two deaths were the same.  


The crack of the gunshot was so loud in the enclosed space that he had to blink to refocus his eyes, but when he could see clearly, there was only one person in the room.  
Dean bent down to touch the young man’s hand, and his soul appeared beside Tessa.  
“You’re not real,” he said despairingly, looking from Dean to Tessa. The gun beside his body was still smoking.  
“I’m right here, bud,” Dean pointed out.  
“No, I mean it was supposed to be over. It was supposed to end.” The young man seemed on the verge of tears.  
For a long moment they stood looking at the body lying beside the bed, a puddle of blood slowly spreading out around its head.  
“It gets better?” Dean offered finally.  
The young man scoffed, and Dean couldn’t blame him.  


“It can’t be time.” The salaryman’s soul backed away from them.  
“Actually, it looks like overtime.” Dean could understand the man, but he couldn’t read his computer screen or any of the labels on the cans at his desk. Then again, energy drinks looked pretty much the same all over the world.  
His joke fell flat. The man still looked terrified.  
“I’m going to wind up in one of the hells. I didn’t believe in anything, not really.”  
“That’s not how it works,” Dean said. “I didn’t believe in any of that and I still wound up going upstairs.”  
“Paradise?” The man faltered.  
“Wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, either.”  
The man’s knees buckled as Tessa caught his elbow.  


Sam, normal Sam, real Sam, Sam-with-a-soul wouldn’t like this. Mowing down a horde of monsters to save him was one thing, but these weren’t monsters. These were normal, ordinary people- who he wasn’t killing, Dean reminded himself firmly. They were dying anyways. He was just collecting their souls. And if not him, then someone else.  


Dean reached past the curtain of mosquito netting and touched the woman’s hand. It was hard to tell how old she was. She looked forty-five, but dehydration had wrinkled her skin and exhaustion had put bags under her eyes. She could be younger than he was.  
Her soul appeared beside Tessa.  
“Oh. This again.”  
Alright, that was an unexpected response. Dean looked at the reaper to see if she was as confused as he was. Her expression was blank. Dean suspected she was doing this on purpose, as part of the test or out of spite. He thought punching her might count as failing.  
“What do you mean “this again”?” Dean settled for asking. Had this woman died before?  
“I often leave my body and walk abroad now. The doctor says it is because of my illness. Perhaps it will stop once I am well,” the woman said softly, staring at her own body with wide eyes.  
Tessa was still silent. She was going to leave all of the hard stuff to him, damnit.  
“You’re not going to get better,” Dean said, and immediately regretted the bald statement. But he had just taken thirty-five souls in deaths similar to this, all within a few hundred miles.  
“You are a wicked spirit, and you are lying!” the woman said fiercely. But her eyes grew wider.  
“I wish I was,” Dean said.  


After just two hours he found himself wondering just how much Sam’s soul was worth, and he tried to push away the traitorous thought. But twelve thousand lives…  
Tessa must have caught his look, because she said “Doing OK there, Dean?”  
Dean nodded.  
“You know, you’re lucky,” she said. “Death gave you a slow day.”  
Dean looked incredulous. He’d been reaping one, often two, souls per second since he started.  
“No natural disasters, no epidemics, not even any major wars.” Tessa ticked off the list on her fingers.  
Thinking about it, Dean had to admit that she was right. The worst single mess he’d had to mop up this morning was a five car pile-up in India from which he’d had to retrieve three souls. “I’m sorry,” he’d told them as they’d stared, scared and confused, at the world which had been theirs only moments before. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  


Some deaths felt like mercy. They were the end of long suffering, from sickness or old age or both.  
“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.” The old man looked longingly over his shoulder to where a younger woman, presumably his daughter, sat by his bedside.  
“They probably know what you would’ve said. Come on.” Dean steered the man, firmly but not roughly, towards Tessa.  
“Have you come to take me to my Reggie?” the old woman quavered. She practically rose out of her body at his approach, leaving the frail thing nestled in tubes without a backwards glance. “Am I finally going to see my Reggie?”  
Of course, Dean told her, unable to admit that, unless she were very lucky, all she’d get would be a paltry copy of Reggie, cobbled together from her own memories. But then, maybe with devotion like that, she would be lucky. She hadn’t even asked who Dean was or if she was dead.  


“You don’t look much like an angel. Are you?”  
Dean got that question a lot.  
“Sorry, you don’t qualify for a Victoria’s Secret knock-off. Guess you shoulda done more good deeds.”  
“Second-class.”  
“We’re trying to revamp the image. What do you think, a little too Joe the Plumber?”  
“I’m a temp.”  
“Be glad I’m not.” That answer received such a horrified look that he only used it once.  


“Excuse me, but do you know what I will be reincarnated as?” Dean received that question and its variants several times as well.  
“If you keep this up, amoeba.” The look Tessa gave him told him that he was decidedly not funny.  
“Sorry, not my department.”  
Finally, Dean went with the honest “End of the line, dude.”  
“Does that mean I have achieved enlightenment?” the withered old man asked, looking up at him with a mixture of hope and trepidation.  
Dean shrugged. “Call it what you like, I guess.” He wasn’t exactly an expert on world religions, but he had always figured enlightenment referred to something more blissful than whatever crap excuse for Paradise Heaven had planned for this man.  


“I’m supposed to take her, right?” Dean asked. He hated himself for asking; the woman couldn’t be much older than twenty-five. But out of the two who looked most likely, she was the less cruel choice.  
“Wait and see,” Tessa said.  
Dean hated that.  
“Clock’s a-ticking,” he nearly shot back, but didn’t. He felt like every second counted. It was strange, how time worked for him. He felt each passing second like the tolling of a bell vibrating through his chest, and in that time he would reap one or two souls. But he had time to speak to them, to answer their questions and to learn their names.  
He watched. The woman looked mostly fine- alert and conscious- but Dean knew that things could go wrong in a moment. Just half an hour ago, he had reaped the soul of a woman who had fallen in a shower. “What a stupid way to die,” she had said in disgust. Dean had been forced to agree.  
Now, he saw that all the room’s occupants: the new mother and the midwife, the midwife’s two helpers, were all looking at one point, and looking worried. The baby in the midwife’s hands wasn’t breathing.  
“Fuck,” Dean murmured. He glanced at Tessa to confirm his guess, and she nodded.  
Dean swallowed hard and stepped forward. He brushed his hand not against the baby’s purplish fingers, but against its forehead. It felt like a mockery of baptism.  
The other souls had appeared beside Tessa, their reaper, but the infant’s soul appeared next to its body. Dean supposed that made a certain amount of sense. A baby couldn’t really move on its own. He swallowed again, and carefully picked up the small soul, carrying it to Tessa.  


That was the first of the children. They were babies, mostly. Most of them seemed too little to understand what was happening. Dean wasn’t sure if this was actually a good thing, or the if relief he felt was simply due to the fact that anything was better than having to explain to a teary-eyed five year-old that he would never get to grow up.  
Some he took from the rooms they were born in. Some he lifted from cradles or pallets or gentle arms in rooms full of caring family. Some lay emaciated, untended and alone. These, he soothed and shushed as best he could before he handed them to Tessa. He was glad to see she held them close. It felt wrong, plucking souls so newly formed, but he couldn’t help but think he was doing some of them a favor. Twenty he took from alleys and garbage heaps.  


This baby was older than most of the others. Her soul still reflected her body’s appearance before illness had withered it down to stick-like limbs and a cadaverous skull. It appeared curled up in the basket of soft rags next to her body and looking for all the world like it was asleep. Dean didn’t know if souls could sleep, but he picked her up as gently as he could anyways. She stirred fretfully. _Please don’t cry_ , Dean begged silently. He didn’t know what he’d do if she started screaming. He could feel Tessa’s eyes boring into the back of his skull.  
“Shhh, ok, there we go,” Dean muttered awkwardly as he bundled the baby into his arms. He was doing this for Sammy. Yeah, he was doing this for Sammy. _Please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, please don’t_ …  
The infant’s dark lashes fluttered, and she stared up at the strange man with a pout forming on her lips. _Damn it_. But rather than shrieking, she turned her head to look back at the little room, at the woman who sat dozing in a chair beside the basket.  
“Ma-ma-ma-ma,” she said. “Ma-ma-ma.”  
Dean felt sick. While he wore Death’s ring, he could understand all human languages, but he didn’t need a magical interpreter to know what the little girl was saying. This word was the same in nearly all human tongues, from Swahili to Mandarin to Hindu to Dutch.  
He kept walking toward Tessa.  
“Ma-ma!” The child stretched out her pudgy arms, reaching toward the sleeping woman. “Mama!” She was screaming now.  
Incarnations of Death, it turned out, couldn’t puke.  


Dean wondered if you could bind Death. He didn’t know a lot about bindings and spells; that kind of knowledge had always seemed esoteric, and he was interested in the practical. He and Sam had seen ghosts attached to objects- mirrors, silver, a portrait, a truck- seemingly by accident. Those were a sort of binding. Maybe Death was too heavy for that kind of crap. He doubted the Colt would work on him, even if they had it.  
But Lucifer had summoned him. It had cost him a whole town, but he had done it. At the time, Dean hadn’t been able to wrap his head around the destruction of an entire town. But now, wearing Death’s shoes, he could see it was just over three hour’s haul. Death took eight Carthages a day.  
If it took some kind of sacrifice to bind him, it would pay for itself in hours at most.  
But what would a world without Death be like? He remembered Greybull, the town where the reapers had been kidnapped. Cole’s soul had been unable to move on, but there had been the miraculous healings too, so different than the robber rolling on the floor in agony. Had that been a mercy on the part of Death?  


She probably wasn’t even thirty, but there was no one else in the room. There wasn’t much in the room, really, just a dirty mattress, some unwashed clothes, and needles. There were a lot of needles. Incarnation of death or no, Dean avoided them.  
You couldn’t be too careful.  
Her life looked like shit, but Dean still looked back at Tessa before he touched her hand.  
“Hell!” The soul’s eyes flew open and she jumped away from Dean. “Bad trip. Bad, bad trip. Shit, I knew this was a crap batch.”  
“Worse than you think,” Dean said.  
“Actually,” Tessa said, “It was too pure. About twice what you’re used to.”  
The girl’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”  
Dean couldn’t make himself say anything, but he guessed his face did the talking.  
The girl looked back at her body, lying crumpled on the mattress.  
“Shit.”  
Dean figured that about summed it up.  


How much was Sam’s soul worth? Dean could no longer push away the question, could no longer even find the energy to call it traitorous. Sam would kill him if he knew what he’d done. Dean doubted he’d have to.  
76,710. Dean stared at the little girl in the hospital bed. Her name was Hilary. She was twelve years old. She was to die in three minutes from a congenital heart condition.  
He couldn’t do it.  
He’d failed. Not just Sam, but something else, something he didn’t like to think about. Even Sam’s soul wasn’t worth seventy-six thousand lives.  


He felt numb. He didn’t think there was room left in his head for anything other than the slide show of names and faces. So when Death said “You’re an affront to the balance of the universe, and you cause disruption on a global scale”, he was surprised he could process the words. Surprised he could feel even worse than he already did. “Disruption on a global scale”. In Death’s clipped understatements, that meant disaster. Tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, floods. A death toll in the thousands. Dean didn’t know how many people he’d saved, but it wasn’t that many. He couldn’t even break even. He was supposed to be one of the good guys, but here he was, some god-damned butterfly starting a storm every time he flapped his wings, killing someone every time he drew breath.  
There was a rifle upstairs in the spare bedroom.  
But when Death said “It’s about the souls,” he called Dean back, because he could see them, all 76,712 of them, young and old, scared and hopeful, and they were souls, all of them, and he couldn’t just let them be snuffed out. That would be even worse than the tidal wave of crashing dominoes he’d become.  
So, yeah, he’d figure out whatever was going on with the souls. But then…  
Well, the rifle upstairs had his name on it.  



End file.
